All,
Apologies for not replying to this thread sooner but I needed time to compose a
thorough response since it throws up quite a lot of issues.
I can reassure you that development is still on-going. Unfortunately, my health
deteriorated again which held things up. I have also encountered some technical
problems which needed time to solve. I had hoped to have something available by
the start of the academic year but that will now have to be the new calendar
year. I'm being deliberately generous because I don't want to raise false hopes
again. I'm pleased to say that I'm doing a lot better now and I can give some
real time to wrap this up.
Regarding the "business model". I decided a long time ago to not charge for the
scripts. I know that this has baffled some people and I'll admit that there
have been times when I seriously considered changing my mind. I believe that
very few users appreciate just how much work was involved in making this
software accessible. Some people seem to think that JAWS scripting is easy and
not real programming. This is simply untrue. The last time I checked, Sibelius
Access was over 30000 lines of code which is enough to be a large program in
its own right. Some of the solutions I came up with are complicated and needed
a great deal of time to both develop and test. I lost count of how many hours I
have spent on this but it is easily a four figure number.
The simple truth is that the amount I would have to charge to justify a
commercial model would make the scripts far more expensive than Sibelius
itself. I get a little fed up of hearing people complain about the cost of
JAWS. They have developers, support staff and sales staff to pay and these
people don't come cheap. The only reason NVDA is free is because they get a lot
of money through good will grants and donations. And Apple have made a decision
to divert some of their vast revenue to employ dozens of developers to work on
accessibility. The small fry have to do things differently.
There's also the problem that the accessible software market (and music
notation software market too for that matter) is undergoing a fairly massive
shift at the moment. It will take a while for all the dust to settle so this
makes no difference for us in the short term but things may change in the next
few years. It makes little sense to ask people to invest heavily in a product
when everything from the brand, operating system, and even hardware is all in a
state of upheaval.
To put it another way. There are two main developers in the field of notation
software now. Both have expressed a desire to make their products accessible
but they both have a long way to go. But there is no telling how quickly they
may progress in the future. And the operating system is a huge concern too.
More and more VI users are switching to Apple although the accessibility of
that platform is definitely a mixed bag. Those who think that the Pro Tools
accessibility model could be transferred to other products are going to be
disappointed. The underlying development technologies are very different.
To put it a third and far more blunt way. Sibelius 6 is all we have at the
moment. However, this could change in the next few years. Avid may be able to
sort out the problems with Sibelius and give us a script free solution.
Steinberg could do the same. However, we may all have to switch to Macs to get
access to it if they decide that Apple's accessibility platform is easier to
work with. Either way, the time it will take to make programs as large and
specialised as music notation software should not underestimated.
Given all this, I hope you can understand why I stand by my decision not to
charge.
Turning to technical matters.
I have seen some comments that Sibelius Access does not need to get information
off the screen because the plugins are doing all the work. This is not the
case. The plugins are essential and provide vital access to a lot of
information which is not available through any other means - as well as
providing a range of navigation and selection features not available through
the keyboard - but there is still a lot of screen grabbing going on. The most
notable examples are the keypad window, mixer, playback window and edit staff
dialog. Let me give you some examples.
You will probably have noticed that the position of the playback line is spoken
after stopping playback. This information cannot be retrieved through object
models or text paint jobs. The only way to get the time codes in the playback
window is to compare the pixels in the windows that hold the clocks to stored
patterns of pixels for each digit. In other words, the scripts look at the
pixels in the first digit and compare them to ten stored patterns that
correspond to each number. It does this for all the digits and then works out a
sensible message to speak. Since I was doing work on film scores when I was
first developing Sibelius Access I needed this information and decided to give
several days to developing this solution.
The mixer is much worse since the scripts have to sweep across sliders and
around rotary controls to get their values. It was necessary to write some new
functions to do colour comparisons since the JAWS built-ins are far to
primitive. The amount of testing I had to do here was fairly extreme and I had
to do most of it without sighted assistance.
A final example is the drum map in the edit staff window. This is a graphic
showing a stave with notes on it. You need to click on notes or drag them
around to make changes to the drum map. This is only possible by having JAWS
crawl around the window looking at pixels and trying to work out which ones
represent notes. This was not a trivial task and again needed lots of testing.
Regarding the plugins. I decided a long time ago to rewrite these so that they
could be used as a library by other plugin developers. This means that
developers will be able to write plugins which describe parts of a score by
tapping into the code I've already written.
The other reason for the rewrite is that I want these plugins to be as easy as
possible for Sibelius' own developers to understand. This will allow them to
incorporate the description algorithms in their own code if they should choose
to do so.
It is important to understand that this solution will be considerably different
to Sibelius 5. Many of the keystrokes will be the same but there are some new
concepts and a much deeper level of accessibility provided. There is a new
navigation system which allows for rapid navigation similar to that used on
webpages, the ability to read a score without selecting anything, the ability
to select any combination of items directly from the score, the ability to
create drum maps and basic access to the page and system layout. The
announcements when navigating are vastly improved. You now get concise
information about the position of notes within slurs and other lines, much
better information about tuplets, and you no longer have to select a note next
to a change of key or meter to know that they have changed. The interval of
transposition for relevant instruments is also automatically spoken and you'll
be told if you move onto a system which has a different combination of visible
staves.
There are many other improvements but I hope this gives you some sense of the
scope of this release.
Regarding Sibelius 8. I will not be doing any work on the accessibility of this
version until Sibelius 6 is complete. This is because Sibelius is by far the
more accessible product. In all honesty, I am not confident that I will be able
to make Sibelius 8 accessible without Avid and one of the screen-reader
developers making changes at their respective ends. The issues are severe and
probably not solvable with scripts. The real difficulty is that these problems
can be very difficult to pin down since they sometimes result in serious
crashes. In any event, there are many parts of Sibelius 8's interface which are
so far behind Sibelius 6 in accessibility that the earlier version is still the
version I would recommend to anyone who is serious about stave notation.
I will keep you informed about my progress but should hear from me again before
the Christmas holidays.
Best,
Dan
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